The ressourcement of
contemporary spirituality
under the guidance of
Adrienne von Speyr and
Hans Urs von Balthasar
Jacques Servais
"God needs more love,
How do we remedy the spiritual deficit that affects so many of our contemporaries today, including Christians, and even Catholics? I submit that the challenge of renewal is that of Vermittlung, of communication. This challenge is set before us here in function of the strictly unified work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr. How do we approach a remedy, how do we translate this word, how do we make it fruitful in the modern Church and world? But since this work, as its authors conceive it, offers itself as a hidden service of the faith, the more fundamental question which I will attempt to address is that of the general ressourcement1 of contemporary spirituality. The response will take the form of a proposition which is actually quite simple and truly classical. The ressourcement in question is transmitted through the maternal mediation of Mary-Church, a mediation modern man needs more than ever in order to rediscover the pathway to God and neighbor. This general proposition will take on, in the work of our authors, a new depth and force, which bespeaks its relevance for our time. To my mind, their mission opens a particular path, especially adapted to our contemporaries, toward rediscovering, according to the aims of Second Vatican Council, the meaning of man as "sincere gift of self" (GS, n. 24). I will develop this response under their guidance, beginning by showing how, before being an object of reflection, Marian mediation confers upon this mission its proper inner form.
the world needs more love;
he needs it at the heart of the Church
and in all the realms of the life of the world."
I. "Vermittlung als Auftrag": it is not easy to render the term "Vermittlung" in English, and the difficulty of translation is but an indication of a deeper difficulty which finds its source in this very concept, so full as it is of meaning in German philosophy. What meaning does this term acquire in Balthasar's theology? Let us first remove some misunderstandings. The term should certainly not be taken in the sense of "Vermittlungstheologie,"2 the Protestant theology whose method consists in mediating contradictory notions of the self, not in order to harmonize them as in scholastic theology, but rather to transcend them in a third term ("Aufhebung" [sublimation]), as we find in Hegelian philosophy.3 What is aimed at, moreover, is not the conception that we find in the theology of an E. Brunner, for whom Jesus must be understood as the "mediation," the point of contact between two moments which remain fundamentally opposed: the transcendence and the historicity of Revelation. It is true that Balthasar's study on Karl Barth might have been considered an attempt at a Catholic transposition of the principle of paradox, elaborated in the 1920s by dialectical Protestant theology. But there is equivocation here: for by basing himself on the central category of the supernatural, our author intends precisely to surmount the internal deficiencies of this theology.
It goes without saying that the idea of mediation can be applied to Balthasar's mission, provided we take the term "Vermittlung" in a sufficiently broad sense. The aforementioned work thus reveals a desire to construct a bridge between the views of Karl Barth and Catholic doctrine, precisely where his master Przywara had failed. Many other of Balthasar's books -- we think of his two (favorite) volumes on the Styles, of his monographs on Buber and Schneider -- constitute similar attempts at dialogue with various representatives of different intellectual and spiritual universes, and even with those that are remote from our current ways of thinking. Raze the Bastions! announces the programmatic title of Balthasar's study compiled during the 195Os, which strove to open the Church of his time to the surrounding world, the Church which at the time risked shutting itself into a position of timid withdrawal: in order to be fruitful, dialogue requires Catholics to have the courage to dismantle the barriers that are in apparent opposition and to make manifest, through their unprejudiced attitude a real capacity for understanding those who are outside.4 Whoever would wish to be faithful to his heritage ought thus, in the same spirit, to enter courageously into discussion with the modern world, and in particular with those defending alternative views. Following the example of our authors, we ought to take into careful consideration the present situation of both the world and the Church and to work toward a reconciliation between these contrasting universes.
Naturally, the work of mediation will be valid only if the person that accomplishes it is formed by his personal faith. Will it thus become a matter of translating the Christian faith into a language adapted to modern man? It is important in this context to stake out the specificity of Balthasar's position with respect to that of other theologians -- Karl Rahner for example, who follows what he calls an "indirect method."5 As Balthasar understands it, mission does not draw its resources from the principles of an apologetic ad extra, one which is primarily concerned with establishing a point of mediation with the persons and realities found on the outside. Evoking the figure of Romano Guardini and the renewal he sparked among the Catholic youth of his time, the author specifies, in his personal notes dating back to the summer of 1946, the nature of the apostolic project such as he conceived it while working as student chaplain at the University of Basel. To Guardini goes the credit, he says, for having opened up access channels for the people outside, and this is certainly an indispensable task. But, must we not inquire, access into what? What use is it to send clever men to the front line, with the mission to be fishermen if once the fish are caught in the net, they are absorbed into the vague mass of those who have remained behind, prisoners of a moribund tradition, of all the rigidity and spiritual dullness that characterizes modern theology? After the event -- but all too late -- conversion will seem to them an opening into a gray and disillusioned reality.
The judgment is harsh, but it comes in fact from a positive conviction: it does not suffice to draw people to the Church; it is necessary to reignite in the Church the light destined to illuminate the world. "Would it not make more sense," Balthasar asks himself, "to devote oneself totally to interior work, to allow the Christian faith to radiate from its most intimate center, and, thus, in such an irrefutable way that the beacons shine toward the exterior and penetrate into the darkest underbrush before the Church."6 Rather than merely presupposing the faith, it is necessary to place it in front, in order that its brightness may be diffused as far as possible. The mission. in short, is Christian radiance, a radiance that emerges from the deepest recesses of the heart of the truth and is diffused to the furthest extremity of the exterior. This means: "to leave everything, most profoundly, to take life in such a way that dead realities themselves prick in vain against this resurrection and that a breakthrough occurs based on the most elementary forces of the Christian faith."7 Such is the intention of his book, The Heart Of the World, which Balthasar wrote immediately following his decisive encounter with Adrienne, and the second edition of which, appearing shortly before his death, is dedicated to young people: a sort of hymn of wonderment at the living Christ "yesterday and today" (Heb 13:8). It is also the testimony he leaves to those who feel called to follow the work of mediation to which he himself had devoted his entire being.
Authentic renewals have always taken place on the basis of a return to the center -- it is thus that Balthasar's book Einfaltungen was translated into French8 -- to the center which means to the heart of revelation which has definitively been accomplished (cf. Heb 1:2-3). More than an operation beginning with man in the search for truth, this return to the center, or according to Péguy's phrase, a "return to the sources," must, if it wishes to be authentic and enduring, follow the path indicated by the New Covenant. It is "from on high," "from the Father of lights," that every perfect gift comes (Jas 1:17). "Indeed, God has so loved the world," St. John emphasizes, "that he has given [abandoned] his only Son so that all men who believe in him will not die but have eternal life" (Jn 3:16). Jesus, who is the definitive gift of the Father to men, is "He who comes from heaven" (Jn 3:31), and only the saints, themselves "born" "from on high" by means of faith (Jn 3:3), are capable of recognizing him and following his path. This means that a welcome, a believing receptivity (cf. Jn 1:11-12), on the part of the earth corresponds to this gift from heaven. The return to the center passes through the "faith in the name of the Son of God" (1 Jn 5:13), the welcome of the Word made flesh which finds its perfect model in Mary's fiat. Only Christ, whose body is the Church because he is the head, is capable of satisfying the powerless and ineluctable desire of man, and to satisfy it with an unexpected superabundance which definitively convinces the latter of the truly divine origin of the gift granted by the Father. But it does not fulfill this desire without the cooperation of the faithful who open themselves unreservedly to this gift from on high. For each period of the Church's history, God creates missions, such as those of a Benedict, a Francis, or an Ignatius, which open to the world a particular path by which it may return to him. These missions are always personal missions, inspired by the Holy Spirit sent by Christ who is seated at the right hand of the Father (cf. Jn 16:7). The subject to whom these missions are entrusted must allow himself to be transformed by the particular charism that they bear, and it is thus that they will accomplish in him, and through him in many other of his contemporaries, their specific goal: to illuminate revelation under a new light, corresponding to the needs of the time. Thus does the subject, who in this way becomes an instrument, himself play, as a theological person, a role of mediation, which completes the descending movement of grace through faithful receptivity.
The mission of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar has, in my opinion, the same breadth of those missions that bring to a given period of history the providential response that it had awaited in secret, without being able to provide the response itself. The mentality of modern man can no longer bear the tension between God and the world, between the body and the soul, that was still maintained in the Middle Ages. The traditional Christian mentality knows this balance. The world is not God, but divine. God is not of the world but acts within the world. The human person is not a pure spirit; he is bound to the fetters of the body. But he is nonetheless not permitted to lose himself in the beauty of the corporeal sphere. He must, on the contrary, be able to detach himself from temporal realities through the strength of the spirit. Now, such a balance is broken once man, through this attitude, yields to the pride pushing him to exalt the part over the unmastered whole. Only humility, that supreme courage, is able to reestablish the balance, to sustain to the end the tension of the Christian life. The man who is humble, in effect, resists the temptation to erect his thinking into an absolute system; he recognizes in corporeality a sign of his finitude, without yielding to the inverse temptation to surrender the properly human power of the spirit over the body.
Balthasar came to understand this response during the spiritual exercises which marked a turning point in his life. The grace received at that point will nevertheless not suffice to liberate him from the temptations of modern ways of thinking. He will find the balance he sought only through a new conversion. It is not without merit to say a word about this, for it marks the point of transition in the direction of a new understanding of mediation, the essential form and content of our authors' mission.
During his formation, in the face of a desiccated theology that he was being taught by his professors, the young Jesuit was overtaken, according to his testimony, by a rage of destruction, quite similar to the feelings of pride that he stigmatized in modern man. "My entire period of study in the Society," he writes, "was a grim struggle with the dreariness of theology, with what men had made out of the glory of revelation. I could not endure this presentation of the Word of God. I could have lashed out with the fury of a Samson. I felt like tearing down, with Samson's strength, the whole temple and burying myself beneath the rubble. But it was like this because, despite my sense of vocation, I wanted to carry out my own plans, and was living in a state of unbounded indignation."9 An interesting passage, which shows how much, in his very effort to unmask the pretenses of the deistic rationalism of our time, Balthasar still remained a prisoner of the traps of the will to mediation stemming from man himself. In order for him to recognize this, Balthasar needed a Marian grace, whose discreet intermediary Adrienne was to become in the life of the mature man. Referring to the path he traveled, the man who had entered into his forties confesses: "It took years, finally not until 1940, for all of my resistance to be broken and for me to accept to surrender myself as one without a will to God's plan whatever it may be.... It took the intervention of Basil and especially the gentleness of St. John, capable of loosening anything, to instill in me the passion of the will to authentic indifference." 10 A confession which he will repeat the day after the publication of a book on the Community of St John, in 1984, in a letter to a young priest who was preparing himself to enter the Society of Jesus. Alluding to the monumental work of his youth, Die Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, he wrote, "Perhaps one day you will see Unser Auftrag and you will thus realize how different today the program of the Apocalypse has become: it is no longer me who unveils it, but I hope to be continually more relieved of my veils by Ignatius and John."11
We said that Balthasar's thought is entirely ordered around a recentering on Christ, but this, we must add, was rendered definitively possible by an interior conversion of vocation, of which Adrienne was the providential instrument. To be sure, in his youth, the Jesuit was not unaware of the urgent need for a return to the living sources of revelation, beyond the incrustations of a ubiquitous rationalism, but he did not carefully weigh the conditions without which this return risked proceeding in a counter-sense to that willed by God: not from below to above, but, as St. Ignatius insists, "de arriba," 12 with its source in a love descending from the very love of God. A new grace of unreserved availability allowed Balthasar to avoid the temptation to which the reformer Luther had succumbed: the temptation of mastery through one's own intelligence and will. Rather than almost desperately seeking to reestablish by his own efforts the defective balance between God and man, between the body and the soul, which would necessarily have ended in placing the point of absolute equilibrium in man himself, the Christian is called to enter into the attitude of confession with respect to Christ -- the habitual disposition of allowing God to act in one's life, renouncing once and for all the control of things through one's own judgment and activity. "Whoever practices the truth," St. John says, "enters the light" (Jn 3:21). Whoever allows truth to enter into his life participates in the light because the truth is already itself the unveiling of that which is hidden ("a-letheia"). Such an attitude is quite similar to the Ignatian grace of being "indifferent, without a single disordered affection," which comes from the Spiritual Exercises (n. 179; cf. n. 23). But it bears a specific Marian dimension. What the Rhenish mystics call "Gelassenheit" and Adrienne qualifies, more accurately, in relation to the fiat of the Annunciation (Lk 1:38), with the term "Geschehenlassen" is an (actively) receptive disposition of the subject with respect to God. The believer chooses to prefer at all costs the divine will to his own, or better still, to conform himself in advance to any possible plan of the Lord.
Here, in my opinion, we touch upon the charism that gives the work of our authors its unique relevance for modern man.13 Their work is, in its internal account, a "trans-mission," a mission of passage, a hidden service rendered to the Church and to their contemporary world because it is animated, at the deepest level, by an attitude of unconditional availability before God. It is fitting to bring to the fore the meaning of this attitude, the fruit of Mary's maternal mediation, if we would hope to rekindle in our contemporaries -- and first in ourselves -- the meaning of the harmonious relationship between the Creator and the creature.
II.
Inseparable from the christocentric "reduction,"14 by which Balthasar announced his programme, Mariology is the most apt passage into the hoped-for ressourcement of spiritual life. After having shown, from a rather formal point of view, in function of the needs and temptations characteristic of our time, the importance of Marian mediation, we will now try to deepen its theological meaning. To do so, we will take as our guiding thread the episode of the wedding at Cana, in which the fourth Gospel reads "the first signs of Jesus" (Jn 2:11). Here is an episode upon which Adrienne has spent much time in meditation, first in her book on the Handmaid of the Lord, and then in her commentary following the Gospel of St. John. Through its rich symbolism, the scene constitutes a harmonic ensemble of traits which sketch out the heart of Marian theology: the idea -- an often contested idea in our age -- of the maternal mediation of salvation.
Some poor people invite Jesus, his mother, and his disciples, to their wedding feast, but there is not enough wine. "They have no more wine," Mary tells Jesus. This brief observation reveals quite clearly the way in which Mary interiorly lives the situation in which she finds herself: "as the Woman," explains Adrienne, "who, like a woman, with a quick glance picks out the needs of the household and sees immediately what is missing." 15 With her, this perception is the fruit of an intimate union between the feminine nature and the grace that elevates this nature to a proper spiritual quality. Moved by the action of the Holy Spirit and simultaneously by the impulse of her own spirit, she intervenes with the Son. Does not this gesture illuminate an essential aspect of her role in the economy of salvation? In his encyclical Redemptoris Mater, John Paul II does not hesitate to describe her intervention as a veritable "mediation": "Mary places herself between her Son and mankind in the reality of their wants, needs and sufferings. She puts herself 'in the middle,' that is to say, she acts as a mediatrix not as an outsider, but in her position as mother. She knows that as such she can point out to her Son the needs of mankind, and in fact, she 'has the right' to do so."16 Whereas the Second Vatican Council appeared rather circumspect in its explanation of Mary's particular "function" in the economy of salvation (LG, n. 60), in his encyclical of 1987, Pope John Paul II does not hesitate to speak of her mediating activity, deeming that she is "much more" than the model and "type" of the Church (RM, n. 65). He believes that the Mother is the prototype of what the Church is called to live, which the Church will not attain until the end of time (RM, nn. 19, 30); she is the "prefiguration" (RM, nn. 27, 55) of that perfect form of sanctity that St. Paul calls the Ecclesia immaculata (Eph 5:27), the figure in which St. Ignatius recognizes "the veritable Spouse of Christ Our Lord, who is Our Holy Mother, the hierarchical Church" (SE, n. 353).
We have no cause for surprise in the fact that Balthasar enthusiastically commented on this encyclical, for it dovetails with Adrienne's vision which had so powerfully fructified his own theology beginning in the l950s. For him as for John Paul II, Mary is the Realsymbol of the Church even while remaining an individual person. In this sense, the interpretation that the pope offers of the scene at Cana, so ripe with doctrinal meaning, is far from being alien to the thought of our authors.17 But with these latter, the emphasis is above all placed on Mary's discretion, which simply draws Jesus' attention to their hosts' shortage, without for all of that anticipating in any way its fulfillment, of which he is the sole master. When to the servants she adds, "Do whatever he tells you," she in no way encroaches upon the prerogatives of the Son, the awaited "glory of Israel," the unique "light for the revelabon of the pagans" (Lk 2:32); she merely invites them to place themselves in a disposition of trust and faith which constitutes her own inner attitude. If she appears here as the mediatrix of all grace, the center of liaison, of mediation between the too-little of the poor people who receive and the superabundance that Jesus, the guest, is to lavish upon them following her intercession, it is first through her quiet, hidden, and contemplative presence -- that of a "humble servant" (Lk 1 48), ready to accomplish anything that the Son commands. The theological role that she assumes within the drama of redemption an essentially feminine one, as in that which St. Paul attributes to the woman during liturgical prayer: she "keeps silent in total submission" (1 Tim 2:11). The mantle of graces in which, according to popular representation, she envelops men and women is this total submission to the word of Jesus, a submission in which the Mother has no need to hear the Son, but that, in advance, through a sure instinct about what he will say, she gives sound instruction. On his own, the sinner would not be able to dispose himself to respond truly to the love of God, who wishes to give himself. Through the intercession of Mary, personam Ecclesiae gerens, he finds a direct access to Christ, in whom, as St. Ignatius says, "the Creator communicates himself to the faithful soul, embracing her in his love and praises, and disposing her to enter into the path by which she will best serve him in the future" (SE, n. 15).
According to St. Thomas, in an article that eventually inspired much commentary, Mary responded, on the day of the Annunciation, in the name of all mankind; her consent engages all men and women.18 Adrienne contemplates the Mother no differently throughout her earthly life. From the Incarnation to the cross, her activity is the pure service of a received mission, an expression of that "yes" which she had addressed, as the New Eve, to the Father and to the New Adam, the Son, the Word made flesh, through the power of the Holy Spirit (cf. Lk 1:38). Moreover, our author adds, echoing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, her fiat is the presupposition of the Incarnation. In effect: "her yes is above all a grace. It is not simply her human response to God's offer; it is such a grace that it is at the same time the divine response to the whole of her life. It is the response of grace in her spirit to the grace established from the beginning of her life." 19 A disciple of the Epiphane of Salamine (365-403) said of Mary that "she is the mediatrix, accomplishing in her creaturely being the unity of heaven and earth." Adrienne no doubt did not know this concise formula of the Pseudo-Epiphane,20 but she herself discovers it and explains this central intuition. To become convinced of this, it suffices to refer to her second Marian book, Mary in the Redemption, a mature work composed in the mid 1950s. She says:
In choosing Mary, God chose the human being capable of bearing God. He has thus so totally associated her with his mysteries that from all eternity she has participated in these mysteries of his trinitarian being, and she was known and created in them and because of them. The grace that she receives is, of course, granted to her at a given moment of time. But it is a grace that had sprung from all eternity, which merely reflects upon earth, in time, that which Mary has always been in heaven, in God's plan.21
Mary communicates to men and women the grace that she receives at a given moment of her earthly life, but which mysteriously, is already inscribed in her being as immaculate creature. Her intervention at Cana, reported by John the Evangelist, is a manifestation of her historical mission; but this itself is the expression of a heavenly mission, already from all time included in God's plan of salvation.
The mediation of grace is, with Mary, an altogether simple, unproblematic act: Mary, according to our author, "has so much grace that she is the mediatrix of many things that she does not grasp. She does not know the plenitude of her graces according to their objective measure. And she was from all time so near to God that the men and women who encounter her experience something of this nearness in her manner of being the mediatrix of grace."22 If man had not sinned, his relation with God and in God with his neighbor would have been lived entirely in the nearness that the Bible renders through the image of Yahweh walking through the garden of Eden (Gen 3:8). This mediation is like the positive counterpart to the gesture by which Eve holds out to Adam the forbidden fruit (Gen 3:6). Adrienne places this gesture in an intimate connection with the act of Adam's sin, the act in which, according to the Latin Fathers, all men and women were mysteriously included. Paralleling the Adam-Christ antithesis, which St. Paul situates at the level of the whole of man (cf. Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:20-22), she sets in relief the opposition between the two Eves. "Eve, by her rejection, became for Adam the mediatrix of all sins, for at this moment Adam was the only one to whom she could communicate something. And through him, her sin passed to every generation." Contrarily, Mary, by her love and her faith, makes manifest what the first Eve should have transmitted to Adam and to all of humanity. "In her purity, she communicates only what God is and what God wishes to communicate. Between what she achieves in her mediation and what God achieves through her mediation, there is a perfect unity and harmony, which is grounded in her participation in grace in God's inner life."23
It is impossible not to see the spiritual proximity of this thought with St. Ignatius's Exercises. A privileged form of prayer in the Exercises is the first colloquy to Our Lady: "in order that she obtain for me the grace of her Son and Lord" for what I request and desire (SE, n. 63). A kindred spirit reigns between this saint and Adrienne von Speyr, as Balthasar more than once remarked. For them, the Christian ought to do nothing other than insert himself subjectively info the objective order of grace that God offers to him through Mary's mediation. "To allow oneself to be penetrated through and through," Adrienne recommends, referring to "finding what one seeks" from the Exercises24 which Ignatius, as a man of action, expresses by saying that 'love ought to be manifest in actions more so than in words" (SE, n. 230). Each of them, in his or her own way, expresses the Marian path that leads to Christ. The effect of Mary's maternal mediation is above all to place the faithful in an attitude of docility and love. By wordlessly carrying out what the Son told them, the servants at the wedding of Cana are the symbol of what Christians can do, at Mary's instigation, to collaborate effectively in the renewal of the spiritual lives of their brothers and sisters. Through her discreet intervention, the Mother of Jesus envelops them within her nuptial relation to Christ. For henceforward, she is for him the "Woman" who, at the foot of the cross, will receive the disciple of love as her son.
III.
As enlightening as they may be, the preceding reflections nevertheless do not yet untangle the knot of the problem, namely, whether Mary's mediation possesses its own effectiveness, distinct from that of the unique mediator of salvation, Jesus Christ This is a significant question, the response to which will decide whether or not the believer has an active participation in the work of redemption. Is the Christian not only the beneficiary but also, even if in a derived sense, the subject, the agent of salvation? In other words, can we speak of the sequela Christi without thereby calling into question the uniqueness of the oblation through which the believer is sanctified (cf. Heb 10:l4)? St. Paul attributes the role of mediator without any possible equivocation to Christ: if we are justified, it is only "through the gift of [the] grace [of God], by virtue of the redemption accomplished in Christ Jesus" (Rom 3:24; cf. 3:26, 5:9; Gal 2:16-17; l Cor 6:11). And Bonaventure explains this role by recalling the etymology of the term "mediator": "Christus [...] medium tenens in omnibus" ["Christ who holds the central place in all things"].25 If Christ is the mediator, it is because he fulfills the function of medium, of the concrete universal "center." How does it stand, therefore, with the role of Mary, as well as that of the Church, to which her role is inextricably bound? To answer this question, we must return to the point of departure of our reflection -- the "christocentric reduction" without which there can be no authentic spiritual renewal.
At the center of the debates that divide modern Christians lies the understanding of the paschal mystery, a drama, according to our authors, written and staged by the trinitarian God, in which Christ, the Son of God made flesh and crucified for our sins, is the principal actor. In the style of St. Ignatius's Exercises, which invites the retreatant to contemplate "Cristo nuestro Senor delante y puesto en cruz" ["Christ our Lord before us and placed on the cross"], the theological mission of Balthasar and Speyr makes continual reference to the "laborious work" of the trinitarian God which culminates in the final act of Golgotha (SE, nn. 53, 236). In the scene of the wedding at Cana which has thus far guided our consideration of Mary's meditating role, Jesus alludes precisely to this central axis of salvation in his response: "My hour has not yet come." Through these words of apparent rejection of his Mother's intervention, Christ indicates the hour of his glorification (Jn 7:30, 8:20, 12:23-27, 13:1, 7:1), of his return to the right hand of the Father, passing through the passion, that hour alone by which the "work" for which he was "sent" will be accomplished (Jn 4:34; cf. 6:30-38). He knows that the fundamental miracle the Father has given him to accomplish is the cross. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, thus must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes may have eternal life through him" (Jn 3:14-15; cf. 15:3). The whole of mankind is included in the redeeming cross. Whether they know it or not, all men are present in the drama of the passion in which their eternal destiny is played out. St. Paul makes explicit what St. John expresses in his symbolic language: "In this God proves his love for us: Christ died for us while we were still sinners.... While we were God's enemies we were reconciled with him through the death of his Son..." (Rom 5:8-10). The expiatory suffering of the passion has earned men's passage, without their knowing it, into the place of salvation.
In contrast to the Lutheran doctrine of justification, we must see in the "pro nobis," above all, an objective reality. "Christ died for our sins" (1 Cor 15:3); his sacrifice consisted in "giving his life in ransom for the multitude" (Mk 10:45; Mt 20:28): an act of obedience and love which no other human being will ever be able to equal. The reconciliation between God and man was effected even before man is able to recognize that fact through an act of faith. "Stellvertretung" is no doubt the most apt theological concept for expressing the absolute priority of the grace of salvation. This vicarious substitution is definitively accomplished in the passivity of the cross, which extends and completes the activity of Christ from the time of his Incarnation. On this point, Balthasar and St. Thomas are in agreement. "Christ," explains the latter, "earned for us eternal salvation from the time of his conception," but because of sin and the punishment incurred through original sin, the passion was necessary. Now, the grace conferred to Christ as head redounds to the members. Thus, "through his passion, Christ merited salvation, not only for himself, but for all the members."26 By these words, Aquinas puts us on our guard against a false interpretation of the role of Mary in redemption. The reconciliation, effected by the cross, is the dramatic act of the Christ-Head, and not of his mystical Body. The redemption announced by the miracle of Cana is the work of Christ alone. The Church, his mystical Body, will be formally constituted only at the foot of the cross, because of this prior inclusion of all men in him.
Such is precisely Adrienne's intuition, which forms the title of the fourth and final volume of her great Johannine commentary: The Birth of the Church. For her, in effect, the central scene of this volume, the Mother and John at Golgotha, becomes the symbolic birthplace. Jesus alone, she insists, hangs on the cross and dies for the sins of all mankind. Mary and John represent the primitive cell of the Church, the seed of the new humanity, "born from above" (cf. Jn 3:3), born from water and the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:5), or again from "the Spirit, water and blood" (1 Jn 5:8; cf. Jn 19:34). In this way, she expresses with her own spiritual perspicacity and originality what St. Augustine, among many other Fathers of the Church, contemplated by means of the biblical image of Eve taken from the side of Adam. "Just as Eve was taken from the side of Adam while he slept (Gen 2:21- 22), so it was with the Lord while he slept, that is, while he slept the sleep of death after the passion: from his side, torn by the lance while he was still on the cross, sprung the sacraments [sacramenta] through which the Church was formed (cf. Jn 19:34). Indeed, speaking of the passion of Christ, it is said in another psalm: 'When I lie down in sleep, I awake again for the Lord sustains me' (Ps 3:6). We must therefore see the passion in sleep. Eve was born from the side [of Adam] while he slept, the Church was born from the side [of Christ] while he suffered."27
The fact that the birth of Mary as Mother of all believers and "Realsymbol" of the Church occurs at the cross still gives only an aspect of the mystery. Meditating on the maternal relation between Mary and the disciple Jesus loved, Adrienne perceives another aspect, which was only slightly developed in St. Augustine: the cooperation of the Mother in the sacrifice of the cross. As it is suggested in the word spoken by Jesus as he entrusted John to Mary's protection, John is called to participate in redemption through that which Catholic piety calls her spiritual maternity. Following Adrienne, Balthasar sets in relief the precise nature of this participation.28 Mary recognizes in the cross the mystery of salvation, and she gives it the conscious and unreserved consent of her faith. But, differently from other men, and in particular John and the other women, she stands there as the Immaculate Conception: through a remarkable grace of "pre-redemption," obtained in advance through the merits of the cross, her faith possesses an unparalleled efficacy.
This is what was suggested, in the fourth Gospel, in the episode at Cana, and it would be good to return here momentarily. The first of the two replies that Jesus gave to his Mother's observation may be interpreted in various ways, but in any case it marks a certain rupture in their relationship: "Woman, what is there between you and me?" St. Thomas comments, "As if he mean to say, I will recognize you as my mother when the time of my passion arrives. And that is why, while hanging on the cross, he entrusted his Mother to the disciple."29 Jesus' reply marks the unsurpassable distance between the only-begotten Son of the Father and the humble servant: it is he, not she, who brings about salvation. Nevertheless, it is she who brings to him the essential cooperation of faith. In her, human activity is integrated into redemption. The cooperation of Mary consists above all in her attitude of abandoning herself, which means entrusting herself to the hands of Providence: "Geschehen-lassen." A similar abandon takes the form at Cana of an accepting of the rejection on the part of the Son.30 Through this disappropriation lived in love, the Mother is, in anticipation, associated with the fruitfulness of the passion. While for the Son, as man, the passion is still to come, for her, as woman, it is already actual. And it is this anteriority of the woman that leads the man to fulfill her desires and work the miracle of "keeping the good wine for last." Among the guests of the earthly wedding feast, no one is aware of the hidden presence within it of the eternal wedding feast of Christ and the Church. And yet it is this secret event which lends a meaning and explanation to the profusion of superabundant superior wine, the sign of the glory of God definitively revealed in the cross.31
In her commentary, Adrienne first points out the unique character of Christ's salvific mission. By his words to Mary, Jesus "signals to her that he now appears wholly as the Son of God, charged with a mission from the Father."32 The level at which his activity will now take place infinitely transcends that of men. Nevertheless, Mary will not be excluded from it. This word of separation anticipates for her the passion of her Son, who is going to die for our sins. She recognizes that man's poverty will be filled only through the cross, and in giving her assent to the Father's hour, as her words bear witness to the servants, she herself consents to walk this path. Humanity is included passively in the redemptive passion, but it is also included actively by virtue of the Mother's faith, archetype of the faith of the Church. Mary's fiat will be, at Golgotha, a constitutive element of the Son's sacrifice, because, in advance, it is the ever living act of a free and conscious availability to follow the Son unconditionally upon the path he leads. Is not this what certain medieval authors, such as Albert the Great, sought to express through the theme of the privilege of the communicatio passionis: Mary is eternally predestined to compassion, through which Christ wished to link his Mother with his redemptive work. Having become a participant in his sufferings, the Mother is graced, in a certain way, with the very merits of the passion: ". . . cui Filius ut dare posset praemium voluit communicare passionis meritum et ut ipsam participem faceret beneficii redemptionis, participem esse voluit et poenae passionis" ["the Son wished to share with her the merit of the passion so that he could give her the merit of its reward, and, so that he could make her a sharer in the benefit of the redemption, he wanted to make her a participant in the pain of the passion as well"].33
Balthasar reflected long on this mystery, in which he sees the principle of a solution to the theological and spiritual problem raised by Luther. The new Eve can be the helper of the new Adam who brings before the Father the sin of the world only if she shares with him the last place, behind all of the sinners. In the scene of the "Behold your Son," the theologian explains, we see that Mary "is in a sense set apart, in a position of apparent uselessness, such that she finds herself in the last place behind sinners. It is only thus that the new Eve is the 'helpmate' (Gen 2:20) of the new Adam, when he brings the fault of all before the Father, and as such occupies the last place. He thereby creates a space for the participation of his Mother, a space different from his own, in that it consists only in a painful access to what he suffers and finally accepts to bear on his own."34 With this condition, the archetypal faith of Mary acquires its own efficacy, even while being intimately linked with the unique sacrifice of the cross. Jesus not only gives to the Church the fruits of his life, and of his passion, he puts himself in her hands in the person of the Mater dolorosa and of all those who, like Mary, will become a "mother" for him, in allowing the will of the Father to be accomplished in him. Thus the separation between the Son who is delivered up and the Mother who accepts his sacrifice becomes manifest more profoundly as a unity, in "one flesh," between the new "Man" and the "woman" (Jn 2:4, 19:26) who, under the cross, becomes his Spouse.
IV.
How, then, -- this was the question with which we began -- do we remedy the lack of spirituality we observe today? Let us attempt, in conclusion, to gather up the elements of the response we have acquired. Our age, an heir of Enlightenment philosophy, is characterized by a disorder in the creaturely relation between God and the world such as it was lived in the Middle Ages. This disorder is due to the modern mentality which tries to erect its thought into an absolute system. The Promethean pride which drives it to exalt the part over the unmastered whole has led it to a sort of spiritual apocalypse, the answer to which must lie in an authentic humility which courageously accepts finitude as the sign of its ontological dependence. Such a solution, accurate in principle, nevertheless risks remaining ineffective insofar as man does not discover, at the heart of his spiritual experience, his incapacity to realize on his own the mediation between the elements in tension, and does not open himself to another type of mediation, the maternal mediation of Mary.
The "Vermittlung," which lies at the heart of the theological mission of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar, is not primarily a principle of operation of the human spirit which seeks to resolve the tensions of created being through its own aptitudes. It is instead the fruit of a Marian grace of unconditional availability to God's action in history. Through the reversal of attitude that it makes possible, the maternal mediation of Mary awakens in the subject the knowledge of the mystery of love manifested in the cross, "id quo majus cogitari non potest" ["that than which nothing greater can be thought"]. In effect, this mystery, the splendor of which alone can convert the world, "is not revealed to us in the form of a doctrine, but of active self-manifestation,"35 and its own force of revelation cannot be effective unless the believer lives in a spirit of receptivity and love, ready to allow himself to be filled with the gift of heaven destined for earth.
In the work of our authors, the mediating presence of Mary is thematized in particular through the spiritual experience of two saints: on the one hand, the "disciple that Jesus loved," he who from the beginning followed Jesus and, at the foot of the cross, received Mary as his Mother; on the other hand, the pilgrim of Loyola, the author of a method which, through the intercession of the Virgin, plunges man straight away into a personal face-to-face encounter with Christ crucified. Balthasar does not hesitate to acknowledge his debt of gratitude in their regard. "For John, the revelation of God in Christ is the Incarnation of the Word in this One, who is unique, loved, and adored; Ignatius appears to me as the point in history where the encounter of man with the God who is the Word and has the word, who addresses, chooses and calls, has become inescapable. In my view, all that is decisive takes place in the spiritual space that lies between the two poles of John and Ignatius."36 Nevertheless, the intuition which was communicated to him through the intermediation of Adrienne is not entirely new. Following a vision received on 26 December 1599, during the first vespers of the feast of St. John, St. Mary Magdalen Dei Pazzi had already explained how, before God, the spirit of John and the spirit of Ignatius are united in the same sense of love. Spiritus Johannis et ille Ignatii est idem. Totus est amare et conducere ad amandum. Illorum scopus et finis amor et caritas" ["The spirit of John and that of Ignatius is the same. Everything is wholly about loving and leading to love. Their purpose and end is love and charity"].37 In any event, with our authors, this intuition inspired not only the content but also the form of all of their theology. It is at the foundation of a "logic of love,"38 altogether different from the logic of the Apocalypse of the German Soul.
We have tried to shed some light on this logic of love by developing two complementary elements of Mariology: the maternal mediation of Mary, the real symbol of the Church with respect to believers, and her specific cooperation in the work of redemption, accomplished by her Son. The logic of love that informs the work of our authors finds its spiritual setting in the nuptial relation between Christ and Mary-Church. Modern man is invited to enter into the intimacy of this relation, which itself is caught up in the intimacy of the trinitarian mystery. Love alone is credible,39 says the title of one of Balthasar's works. The love that is credible in the eyes of men is the love that comes to us from a Marian faith, which extends into our lives the love of God maulfested in Jesus Christ (cf. 1 Jn 3:16). The logic of love, which leaves its trace in the life and writings of our authors, leads us to the Reality itself which, like the finger of John the Baptist pointing to the Lamb of God, these authors wish to indicate while effacing themselves. This love, offered to man in Christ, can be received only with a pure heart (cf. Mt 5:8). It is in allowing ourselves to be generated, like John, by the Woman who the Man of Sorrows gives to him as Mother, that we may hope to contribute to the ressourcement of spiritual life in our age. Mary-Church, whom the Book of Revelation describes as the pregnant Woman "crying in the throes of labor" (Rev 12:2), leads the believer to a personal "metanoia." The mission of our authors will be capable of spreading into the world for which it is destined only if it finds men and women ready to realize in themselves this reversal of perspective, to live the spiritual receptivity which is in a sense the hermeneutical key to their work. The task of "Vermittlung" that falls to us is thus much more than an external communication, a transposition of their writings into a language more suitable for our time or the simple linear pursuit of what has been transmitted: it is a work of mediation, exercised in the inner obedience to the mission that they themselves have served. If it is true, as Cardinal Ratzinger declared during the funeral mass for Fr. Balthasar, that the latter is a spiritual master capable of guiding our contemporaries on the path of sanctity, a source of authentic and durable ressourcement of spiritual life, it suffices to allow this mission to become fruitful through our persons, in the Marian attitude that he himself learned from Ignatius and John.
The response that such a mission delivers to the needs of our time possesses the simplicity of all authentic renewals: "God needs more love, the world needs more love; he needs it at the heart of the Church and in all the realms of the life of the world."40 This is a need born from the experience of a gratuitous and superabundant gift, received from above, that Mary-Church communicates to us with the same prodigality by enveloping us in her maternal disposition, filled with a loving humility and gratitude toward the Divine Majesty (SE, n.108): the gift of a personal encounter with the Word made flesh in the situation of spiritual shortage in the world today.-- Translated by David Louis Schindler, Jr.
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1. [The term ressourcement, here and elsewhere in the text designates that particular form of renewal which occurs through a "return to the sources" or origins. -- Trans.]
2. Cf. Räumer, "Vermittlungstheologie," in LThK 10 (1996): 719.
3. Cf. K. Lehmann, "Vermittlung," in LThK 10 (1996): 718-19: By "mediation," we mean the intervention of a middle term that unifies concepts or objects which are opposed and which, in that opposition, do not reveal at first the possibility of reconciliation. In "Evangelium und Philosophie" [in Freiburger Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Theologie 23 (1976): 11], Balthasar stigmatizes the "grosse Versuch Hegels, der von einem liberal verstandenen Johannes-Christentum die Kehre zu einer allgemeinen Logisierung der Liebe macht" ["The great experiment of Hegel, who makes the turn from a Johannine Christianity understood in a liberal sense to the reduction of love to a universal logic"].
4. Cf. Balthasar, Karl Barth (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), 390 [The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992)].
5. Cf. K. Rahner, "Pluralismus," in LThK 8 (1963): 566ff.
6. A. von Speyr, Erde und Himmel, II.Die Zeit der grossen Diktate, Nachlasswerke, ed. H.U.v.Balthasar, v.9 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1975), 194-95.
7. Ibid.
8. In English, the title was given as "Convergences. -- Trans]
9. Ibid., 195. English translation quoted in Peter Henrici, S.J., "A Sketch of von Balthasar's Life," trans. John Saward, from Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press and Communio Books, 1991), 13.
10. Ibid., 195-96.
11. Letter from Balthasar, cited in F. Trösch, "Dank an den Zeugen," in Hans Urs von Balthasar 1905-1988 (Basel: Privatdruck der Akademischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 1989), 24.
12. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (=SF), trans. Anthony Mottola (New York: Doubleday, 1964), n. 184.
13. Cf. Balthasar, "Le charisme d'Adrienne," in La mission ecclésiale d'Adrienne von Speyr. Acts du colloque romain (27-29 Septembre 1985) (Paris: Lethielleux, 1986), 175; Erster Blick auf Adrienne von Speyr (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1989), 44ff. [A First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, trans. Antje Lawry and Sr. Sergia England (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, l981)].
14. Cf. Balthasar, "Summa summarum," in Spiritus Creator. Skizzen zur Theologie III (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1988), 323 [Explorations in Theology III: Creator Spirit, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993)].
15. A. v. Speyr, Magd des Herrn (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1949), 114 [Handmaid of the Lord (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985)].
16. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater (=RM), n. 21; cf. also nn. 40 and 46.
17. In RM, n. 44, the pope explicitly mentions the theology of Balthasar.
18. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, 30, 1; cf. St. Bernard, Super missus est 8 (SC 390:224ff.).
19. Magd des Herrn, 8.
20. Hom. V in laudes S. Mariae Deip (PG 43:492B).
21. A. von Speyr, Maria in der Erlösung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1979), 20.
22. Ibid., 22.
23. Ibid., 22-23.
24. A. von Speyr, Lumina und neue Lumina (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1969), 93; cf. SE, n. 4.
25. Hexaem. 1, 10 (in Opera omnia V 330); cited in Balthasar, Theologik II (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), 144. Bonaventure, however, makes the following distinction: "Differt dicere esse medium et esse mediatorem. Medium namque dicit communicantiam cum extremis. Mediator autem dicit non tantum communicatium, sed etiam dicit officium reconciliationis" ["There is a difference between saying to be the middle, and to be a mediator. For middle implies communication with extreme points, but mediator denotes not oniy communication but also the office of reconciliation"] (In III Sent., d. 19, a. 2, q. 2, conc., in: Opera omnia 111:410).
26. Summa III, 48, 1, c. et ad 2.
27. St. Augustine, Enarrat. in Ps. 138, 2 (PL 37:1785).
28. On this point, see Balthasar, Theodramatik III: Die Handlung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1980), 363ff.
29. St. Thomas Aquinas, Lectura super Johannem (Torino: Marietti, 1952), n. 352.
30. The gospel Provides other examples of this rejection (Lk 2:49; Mt 12:46-50), which Adrienne von Speyr has commented on in the same sense.
31. Cf. Balthasar, "Kornrnt und seht," Meditationen des Lebens Jesu, Informationszentrum Berufe der Kirche (Freiburg i. Br., 1983), 10.
32. A. von Speyr, Johannes I: Das Wort wird Fleisch (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1949), 214 [John I: The Word Becomes Flesh, trans. Lucia Wiedenhöver and Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994)].
33. Mariale, resp. ad qq. 148-50: Opera omnia, v. 37, ed. Borgnet 219a.
34. Balthasar, Theodromatik II, 369 [Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory II: Dramatis Personae (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 199O)].
35. Balthasar, Einfaltungen. Auf Wegen christlicher Einigung (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1988), 86.
36. Balthasar, Mein Werk. Durchblicke (Einsiedein: Johannes Verlag, 1990), 18 [My Work In Retrospect (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993)].
37. Cf. D. Mollat, La vie et la gloire. Exégèse spirituelle II (Paris: Cerf, 1980), 160.
38. Balthasar Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik III/2, tome 2: Neuer Bund (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1988), 102 [The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics VII: Theology: The New Covenant (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989)].
39. Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe, the title of a small book by Balthasar, written in 1963 [Love Alone: The Way of Revelation (London: Burns and Oates, 1968)].
40. Umrisse einer Gemeinschaft, an out-of-print pamphlet, 1; cf. Balthasar, Unser Auftrag. Bericht und Entwurf (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1984), 111.
Communio 23 (Summer 1996). ©1996 by Communio: International Catholic Review Reprinted with Permission from Volume 23, pages 300-321.